User Privacy and controls around metadata

[Thad Guidry]

Do we have strong feelings around user privacy for us NOT keeping any record of a filename in the metadata when importing?  I think we should not keep a record of the original filename imported in the metadata, but if users what to keep some metadata of the original format, name, etc. then we are currently presenting that at Project Creation time and allowing them to rename or keep this stored as part of the project metadata and searchable, correct?  I'm pretty sure that having complete privacy was the ask that I heard from Open News folks and a few others at NICAR that process whistleblower files.

To that end... do we or do we not keep anything about the original files being imported somehow, other than the displaying the original filename and allow to easily rename on import ?



Noting this option on some of the importers...

  Store file source (file names, URLs) in each row

Thad

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/

[Tom Morris]

For the vast majority of users, the original data source, whether it be a filename or URL, is a very valuable piece of provenance. We can make storing it optional for the paranoid, but we shouldn't make life more difficult for the many to placate the few.

Tom

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[Thad Guidry]

Agree Tom.

So my question still stands.  Are we internally keeping the original filename somewhere (maybe in the metadata), even when users at Project Creation time are renaming the filename?

Thad

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/

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[Tom Morris]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2020 at 6:13 AM Thad Guidry <thadg...@gmail.com> wrote:

Are we internally keeping the original filename somewhere (maybe in the metadata), even when users at Project Creation time are renaming the filename?

I don't know off the top of my head, but a simple experiment should tell you. After you've imported your super secret file, click "Browse workspace directory" and search the workspace.json file for your secrets to see if they're in there. If OpenRefine isn't behaving the way you want, please create a ticket for the feature/bug.

Tom 

[Thad Guidry]

OK, good idea.

Thad

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/

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[Thad Guidry]

OK, so as suspected and as heard by folks at NICAR... yes, it seems the metadata.json does hold onto this... "github-recovery-codes.txt" was stored as fileSource, even though I name changed to "name":"mineTest" at project creation.

And travels with it during an OpenRefine Project export as well inside the metadata.json

I've opened the issue:  https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/issues/3390

{

    "created": "2020-12-07T17:49:58Z",

    "modified": "2020-12-07T17:50:01Z",

    "name": "mineTest",

    "password": "",

    "encoding": "US-ASCII",

    "encodingConfidence": 0,

    "tags": [],

    "creator": "",

    "contributors": "",

    "subject": "",

    "description": "",

    "rowCount": 16,

    "title": "",

    "version": "",

    "license": "",

    "homepage": "",

    "image": "",

    "importOptionMetadata": [

        {

            "encoding": "US-ASCII",

            "linesPerRow": 1,

            "ignoreLines": -1,

            "limit": -1,

            "skipDataLines": -1,

            "storeBlankRows": true,

            "storeBlankCellsAsNulls": true,

            "includeFileSources": false,

            "projectName": "mineTest",

            "projectTags": [

                ""

            ],

            "headerLines": 0,

            "fileSource": "github-recovery-codes.txt"

        }

    ],

    "customMetadata": {},

    "preferences": {

        "entries": {

            "scripting.starred-expressions": {

                "top": 2147483647,

                "list": [],

                "class": "com.google.refine.preference.TopList"

            },

            "scripting.expressions": {

                "top": 100,

                "list": [],

                "class": "com.google.refine.preference.TopList"

            }

        }

    }

}

Thad

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/